The Dark Eye: Demonicon project manager Stefan Hoffmann is offering up a second developer diary over at RPG Vault. This time around, he covers the RPG's storyline:

To prevent characters from becoming an array of stereotypes only, we wrote a proper biography for each one, with increasing detail according to their respective importance. NPCs have to be designed as if they were actual people, with their own desires, fears, strengths and weaknesses. Just like their real-life counterparts, they have their own goals and moral standards, and each one's personality is the result of the individual's background and experiences. From this, you can then deduce an outer appearance, so our concept artist was able to begin work on giving them their visual representations.

During this phase, we constantly checked how the various relationships between the NPCs and the player character would develop and change during the game. If deep conflicts and strong feelings were to be created, they were made to appear more believable and consistent. In particular, the important NPCs were and are optimized in this regard.